Rim Worlds Articles Page

An Interview With A. Bertram Chandler
By Darrell Schweitzer

This interview was originally published in the March 1983 issue of Amazing Stories Magazine, and is reprinted here as it originally appeared in that magazine, with the exception of a change in formatting. An annotated version of this same interview will eventually appear below the original.

A. Bertram Chandler is probably the best known Australian science fiction writer. He is British by birth, but has resided in Australia for many years. As should be obvious to anyone who reads one of his stories, Chandler has had much experience at sea. He has served in the British, Australian, and New Zealand merchant navies, and has consistently made use of this background in his stories and novels, notably the Rim Worlds/John Grimes series. He began writing for John W. Campbell’s Astounding during World War II and was a regular contributor to the early New Worlds. His novels began to appear in the late 1950s and have been doing so regularly ever since. He retired form the sea in 1975, and has been able to devote more time to writing as a consequence. Ace Books has recently begun to reissue the Grimes series in chronological order, two novels to a volume. His most recent novel is Matilda’s Stepchildren.

Q: Why did you turn to science fiction, rather than sea stories?
Chandler: Because many years ago, I was accused by the late John Campbell of writing sea stories thinly disguised as science fiction. Which I think I do.
Q: What do you see as the similarities between life in an ocean-going vessel and life in a spaceship?
Chandler: It was many years ago, in fact during World War II, that Heinlein said that only people who know ships can write convincingly about spaceships. And I think it is largely true that one finds an author with no sea experience tends to man his spaceships with hordes of useless ratings falling over each other. He hasn’t the faintest idea about a ship’s routine or organization. Now essentially, a spaceship, the real spaceship of the future, as opposed to our present puddle-jumpers, will be like a surface ship of today inasmuch as she will be going a long way in a long time, and inasmuch as the crew will have just one thin sheet of metal between them an eternity.
Q: Then isn’t it much closer to a submarine?
Chandler: Actually, the submarine is a spaceship, because you have human beings inside a metal shell, living and working in an utterly hostile environment.
Q: What drew you to science fiction originally?
Chandler: Science fiction is something—the talent for it and the liking for it—that you’re born with. A few people acquire the taste in later years, but most of us, I think, were actually born science fictioneers, either as readers or as writers.
Q: When did you get started? The earliest story of yours that I’ve seen was “Giant Killer,” in a 1945 Astounding.
Chandler: I think my earliest story was about 1942 or 1943. It was written shortly after the USA entered World War II. At the time I was an officer in one of the leading English liner companies. The normal peacetime trade was between England and Australasia. And with World War II, we were shunted off our normal tramlines, and so I paid my first visit to New York. In New York, I thought that I would like to meet the editor of what was then my favorite magazine, Astounding Science Fiction. So I went trotting around to the sacred edifice, and was ushered into the sacred presence, and John said that because of the war, with so many of his authors being involved in military service, he was very short of stories, and perhaps, as a faithful reader, I might oblige. And the next time in New York I had with me the manuscript of a very short story, which I’d hammered out painfully over about a fortnight. The same thing today would have taken on the outside two mornings’s work, or working right though, a day’s work. So I presented this precious opus to John in person, and said, “Well I suppose I’d better leave return postage,” and he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll send it back.” The ship proceeded back to the U.K. in a very slow convoy, and among the mail awaiting me was not the return manuscript, but a check. And so, for the remaining years of World War II, I was writing short stories practically exclusively for Astounding. Then there were a few rejects which I was able to sell to the other magazines in the field. During my career I have had very few short stories or novels which have failed to sell to somebody sometime. I’ve been very lucky.
Q: Did Campbell give you story ideas the way he did to a lot of other writers?
Chandler: To take one example, the story “Giant Killer,” which by rather too many people is regarded as a sort of classic: I got the idea because at the time I was second mate of a steamer which was infested with rats. In fact it was so bad that they used to keep a .22 rifle on the bridge, so that on moonlit nights the officer on watch could amuse himself potting at rats. So I got the idea of “Giant Killer” and the first version was called “Derelict.” It was written from the viewpoint of the crew of a ship which finds this derelict adrift in space and on boarding her finds that she is infested with mutated rats. John read this and said, “Well, no, no, no. It’s your story, and I want you to write it, and I want it my way. Try it again from the viewpoint of the original crew.” I am very sorry that the carbon copies of the second version have long been lost. That was a real boot. It was called “The Rejected,” the title coming from The International: “Arise ye starving from your slumbers, Arise rejected of the earth.” It had a Russian spaceship, and I stressed the irony of this crowd of mutinous mutants seething under the comrades’ feet. The atmosphere was simply lovely. There were portraits of the Little Red Father, red plush frames. There was even sex, which for those days was rather unusual. And John read this masterpiece and said, “Chandler, I would point out to you that Astounding Science Fiction is neither Thrilling Romances, nor a monthly edition of The Daily Worker. Take it away and do it again from the viewpoint of the rats.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “Yes, you heard me.” So next time in New York, I had the first thousand words of “Giant Killer.” By that time I was a regular weekend guest at John’s home parties and at this one there were present George O. Smith, Ted Sturgeon, and Lester Del Rey. And so I passed around the pages of the first thousand words, and everybody asked where the rest was, and I said, “This is all there is unless John says that he’ll buy it.” And so John said that he would buy it when it was finished, and that was that.
Q: Which version do you prefer?
Chandler: Actually “Giant Killer” is a very good story, but I would have loved to have seen the second one in print. Now probably if I read it today I would think that it was horribly over-written. It probably was, too.
Q: Did you ever find it restricting when Campbell wanted it done his way?
Chandler: I think that among authors of my age group, the majority of us think that Campbell was God. There were only a few who had rather unkind words to say regarding hi. But John’s judgments were very sound, and his recommendations were certainly well worth following.
Q: Eventually you did drift away from him. Why was that?
Chandler: I’d say one reason was that in those days for some obscure reason Street & Smith {The publishers of Astounding] insisted on buying all rights, and if one sold to Street & Smith, it meant the story was frozen; whereas if I sold the original to one of the other magazines in New York, I could send one carbon to a magazine in England and another to one in Australia. In fact in the case of “Giant Killer,” because my agent omitted to get the rights back from Street & Smith, the story has been anthologized three times, and I’ve only been paid once, and the only reason I was paid was because the person doing the anthology approached me first.
Q: Eventually you got into novels. Did you ever sell novels to Astounding?
Chandler: The Rim of Space appeared in Astounding as “To Run the Rim.” The novel version was an expansion. And The Ship From Outside appeared as “The Outsider” and was also expanded. But I’ve never actually had a full-length novel published in Astounding.
Q: Have you found any other editor to be as helpful as Campbell was?
Chandler: I don’t think so. I’d say actually that the circumstance was that I had Campbell when I was just beginning, and since then, with other editors, I’ve been large enough to stand on my own feet.
Q: In other words they take what you give them rather than tell you what they want?
Chandler: I’ve had occasional arguments, but I’ve usually won.
Q: Do you miss the interaction with the editor as the story is actually being written? Would you still find it useful?
Chandler: As long as it’s a good editor, as Campbell was, but now and again one strikes editors who can be described only as officious. Officious editing is very annoying. You may recall that during the reign of a certain person, who shall be nameless, in the editorial chair of Galaxy, every writer was screaming to high heaven about the way in which their stories had been mangled. It wasn’t Fred Pohl. He was a very good editor. It wasn’t Jim Baen either, so [laughs] you can sort of bracket, one short and one over, and you’ve got what comes between. He was utterly a pain in the ass.
Q: Do you want to be quoted as saying that?
Chandler: Yes. {Laughs.] I actually fell out with him over a short story, which was later expanded into a full-length novel, The Broken Cycle, which was published by Robert Hale in 1975 and by DAW in 1979. At the time I had running concurrently in Galaxy what was in effect two series. There was the young Mr. Grimes in the Survey Service. At the time of The Broken Cycle, he was Lt. Commander. And there was the somewhat elderly Commodore Grimes of the Rim Worlds. And in The Broken Cycle Lt. Commander Grimes of the Survey Service has an affair with a policewoman. This editor objected because Grimes must be unfaithful to the beautiful Sonya. So I wrote a rather sarcastic letter pointing out that there was a big difference between a Lt. Commander in one service, two and a half rungs up, and a Commodore in another service with one broad band, and that Sonya was still very far in Lt. Commander Grimes’ future. I explained naval ranks in great detail, and I pointed out that even Hornblower was unfaithful to his Lady Barbara and that even Lady Barbara herself had a roll in the hay with some Austrian count in Vienna. I fear that I was too sarcastic, so I never sold another thing to Galaxy until there was a change of editor.
Q: Has your approach to writing changed over the years?
Chandler: Well, ever since he took charge, Grimes has been, as it were, my mouthpiece. We share the same biases, the same likes and dislikes, the same views.
Q: You mention that he ‘took charge.’ Did you originally plan to write this many Grimes stories, or did the series just grow?
Chandler: Actually, Grimes started as a very, very minor background character, and then, for some reason, in Into the Alternate Universe, I decided that Grimes should have a novel all to his little self. It was since then that he started to really take charge. Then there has been some confusion, because having established Grimes as a fairly senior officer, I did the same as Forester did with Hornblower. I thought, well, the man must have some background, and I went back in time to chronicle the adventures and misadventures and misdeeds of earlier days. The first of these novels was The Road to the Rim, in which Grimes is just starting his career in the Survey Service. And then I had, as I said, the two series running concurrently. I’d write a Survey Service when I felt like it, and a Rim Worlds Grimes when I felt like it, and then readers started complaining about the great gap between the two Grimeses. Why did Grimes leave the Survey Service? I was hinting now and again that there had been some really outrageous misadventure which led to his being emptied out. So I wrote The Big Black Mark, which I thought filled the gap. Then the various readers screamed that the gap had not been filled. So I am still trying to fill the gap. The more I write to fill the gap, the more it stretches.
Q: Do you see yourself writing Grimes indefinitely?
Chandler: Yes. But apart from everything else, the only publisher who has insisted in having things in their proper order has been Hayakawa Shobo in Tokyo, and the series has such a big following in Japan, that if I dropped Grimes or killed him off, there would be the most dreadful screaming.
Q: Is it true that none of the Grimes books have been published in Australia?
Chandler: None have as books. In the last two Paul Collins anthologies, there was Grimes Among the Gourmets [Other Worlds, Void Pubs., 1978] and in the following [Alien Worlds, 1979] there were several excerpts from Matilda’s Stepchildren, which has yet to be accepted by any publisher in the USA, although it’s been published in London and Tokyo.
Q: Are the stories not popular in Australia, or is there not much of a science fiction publishing industry there?
Chandler: There is not much of a publishing industry period. The only two novels I have had published in Australia have been False Fatherland, which has been published by Horwitz, and with the title changed, published as a serial by Fantastic in the USA [As Spartan Planet March-May 1968] and then by Dell and later by Ace – and of course the money made by the American and Japanese sales was far in excess of the money made on the Australian sale – and the other one was a rather good novel, very well reviewed, which was an absolute flop from the financial viewpoint, The Bitter Pill, published by Wren in 1974.
Q: The Bitter Pill was much different from what you usually write. Do you think that the failure was because the readers were expecting Grimes?
Chandler: Actually, what I think is that if Dennis Wren had published the damn thing in soft cover, it would have sold much better.
Q: What are your writing methods like?
Chandler: When I’m driven to it by hunger….Well, actually, with a novel, I have a good idea of the beginning, and I know the end toward which I am working, and what happens in between is anybody’s business.
Q: You come upon it as you’re writing it?
Chandler: For the last one I sold, The Star Loot, upcoming from DAW, as an experiment I used the I-Ching as a plotting machine. It worked quite well.
Q: Did you toss coins or the little sticks?
Chandler: Coins.
Q: How do you plot with something like that? I’d think it would tend to randomize things.
Chandler: You toss the coins, and get an idea as to the course of action, carry on until you grind to a halt, then toss the coins again. The results were quite satisfactory.
Q: Are you going to do it that way again?
Chandler: I might. No, actually, the book which I am working on now, To Rule the Refugees, is based closely on the Rum Rebellion in New South Wales, just like The Big Black Mark is based very closely on the mutiny aboard the Bounty. In each case, Grimes plays the part of Blight, and so this new one is based very closely on when Captain Bligh was governor of New South Wales and was mutinied against by his garrison.
Q: To be mutinied against twice, he must have been doing something wrong.
Chandler: No, he wasn’t. Bligh, throughout his career, was an outstanding seaman and navigator, and in each case he had the misfortune to be afflicted by really bad bastards: in the Bounty affair, mainly Fletcher Christian, and in the Rum Rebellion, those horrible bastards of the New South Wales Corps. On each occasion Bligh was absolutely in the right.
Q: I suppose the other guy is romanticized as being the underdog.
Chandler: Yes. In the case of the Rum Rebellion, the early garrisons of New South Wales were taken from the Royal Marines, and they weren’t very satisfactory. So a special corps was formed, consisting in all ranks, of absolute throwouts from the British Army. All the really bad types. The officers of the New South Wales Corps were up to their eyebrows in every racket, and in fact became the robber barons of that period. And Bligh was for the small farmers and even the convicts, and officers of New South Wales Corps resented this. After the Rum Rebellion, the ringleaders were court-martialed and got off far too lightly – they should have been shot. There were other governors, and as long as the New South Wales Corps were organized as a military party, they were a pain in the ass to every governor. They were making the governor’s lives miserable. Then of course these people, who grabbed vast stretches of land, became the ancestors of the so-called best families of New South Wales, who, in order to sweeten the memories of their own ancestors, have done their damndest to blacken Bligh’s memory ever since. That’s the origin of all the unfounded stories about the bullying, tyrannous, arrogant Captain Bligh.
Q: Have you thought of doing a straight historical book to set things right?
Chandler: Well, oddly enough, the project on which I am now engaged, Kelly Country, is a sort of historical novel. In fact there were screams from the Australian science fiction community when the names of those successful in obtaining fellowships were announced late last year. I was listed as having been granted a two-year senior fellowship to write a historical novel. Everybody screamed, “Chandler’s sold out to the establishment,” Whereas in actuality what I am writing is an “If” of history novel, which required as much research as a straight history.
Q: How do you take a series of historical events and turn them into science fiction without the result seeming like historical fiction in a thin disguise?
Chandler: Well, the whole point was that there was not, in actuality, an Australian war of independence in 1880. I shan’t change the course of history. I shall have the Australian war of independence breaking out in 1880. I shall have a charismatic leader, who furthermore, had much more imagination than the average general of his day: a leader who would have the brains to grasp the fact that a steam-operated gatling fun, which could have been used in those days – Gatling was willing to make the things – would have a far higher rate of fire than a hand-operated one, and furthermore could have been of a much higher caliber; a man who would have had the intelligence to use a far-fetched device, such as the Andrews Airship, which actually flew successfully in the USA in the 1860’s. The darned thing worked, but nobody took it up.
Q: Lighter than air? Like a dirigible?
Chandler: Yes, lighter than air. It was dirigible. It could be steered. It would go where it was supposed to go. In fact, if you’ve read Grimes and the Great Race I the April 1980 Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, I have based the racing airships in that story on the Andrews Airship. So from that, you get an idea as to how it worked. It could have been used.
Q: What do you plan to do once you’ve finished with Kelly Country?
Chandler: Kelly Country will require about a year’s research and a year’s writing, of course meanwhile I am being maintained by the Australian taxpayer in the style to which I have become accustomed. Then, having finished Kelly Country, I hope to sell it at a good price, because it remains my property, after which, of course, I return to Grimes, now that he’s had his long service leave.
Q: What do you find the most satisfactory of anything you’ve done?
Chandler: I think that perhaps my favorite is The Big Black Mark. As I said, that was based very closely on Blight and the Bounty. Because, you see, there are certain seamen who are, you might say, in my own private pantheon. My favorite seamen, I suppose, are Matthew Benders; and of course Cook; and Bligh; and the American Commodore Levi – he was quite a lad – and of course Joseph Conrad, the finest novelist of the English language; Dampier, the literary buccaneer; and going back quite some years, Will Adams, who was the real live character that James Clavell based his Major Blackthorne on in Shogun.
Q: Presumably Conrad influenced you as a writer. What other writers did?
Chandler: Regarding the use of words, even though I am an agnostic, I’d say the King James version of the Bible.
Q: How about C.S. Forester?
Chandler: And of course Forester. Regarding him, I didn’t realize for quite a while that Grimes was one of his bastard sons. He’s had quite a few. Though, oddly enough, I just don’t like any of the many imitation Hornblowers. The only character, the only sea captain of that period by another whom I like, is O’Brien’s Captain Jack Aubrey. The same period as Hornblower, but one knows that if the two met, they would hate each other. All the other imitation Hornblowers are modeled far too closely on Hornblower.
Q: Did you ever have any contact with Forester about Grimes being a bastard son of his character?
Chandler: No. I didn’t realize to what an extent Grimes was modeled on Hornblower – it was really quite unconscious p until, I would say, much later on, when my wife, whenever she wanted to annoy me, would refer to Grimes as Hornblower. “Not another Hornblower book, darling.” Then I suddenly realized it, and I did what Forester did with Hornblower. I decided to establish the character’s background with The Road to the Rim which, as you may recall, was dedicated to Admiral Lord Hornblower. This, oddly enough, led to a sharp increase of Forester’s sales. Unluckily at that time, he himself could no longer benefit. But his estate did. This dedication also led to a sharp increase of his sales in Japan, because Japanese readers, seeing the dedication, asked “Who is Hornblower?” Then, of course, if you explained who Hornblower was, they’d go and buy Hornblower books. {Laughs.]
Q: Are there any science fiction writers you would consider to be an influence?
Chandler: Wells, of course.
Q: But none of the contemporaries?
Chandler: No. There are many whom I admire very much indeed though.